William Hogarth - gallery and images of art paintings reproductions of the artist, painter biography

William Hogarth

William Hogarth Biography

English artist
born 1697 - died 1764

Apprentice to: Sir James Thornhill (1675-1734).
Son-in-law of: Sir James Thornhill (1675-1734)

William Hogarth is unquestionably one of the greatest English artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. The painter is the great innovator in English art. On one hand, William Hogarth was the first to paint themes from Shakespeare, Milton and the theater, and the founder of a wholly original genre of moral history, which was long known as Hogarthian. On the other, the artist investigated the aesthetic principles of William Hogarth art, which resulted in his book “The Analysis of Beauty”(1753).

William Hogarth was born on 10 November, 1697. He was the 5th child of Richard Hogarth, a schoolmaster and classical scholar from the north of England who had come to London in the mid-1680s. His father’s premature death in 1718 affected his early life, his training and forced him to earn money.- William Hogarth reproductions, images and biography and antique oil paintings England.

In February 1713/14, he began his apprenticeship to a plate engraver, Ellis Gamble, who was a distant relation. By April 1720, the painter set up an independent business as an engraver. First William Hogarth paintings included a number of commissions for small etched cards and bookplates, and in 1721 William Hogarth produced two inventive engraved allegories. With these topical prints The South Sea Scheme and The Lottery, which aroused considerable attention, William Hogarth artist started his black-and-white satires which made him so widely known in Britain and abroad. His first success as a painter was in the ‘conversational pieces’, in which figure informal groups of family and friends surrounded by customary things from their everyday life. He was not the inventor of the genre, and had many contemporary rivals, but William Hogarth images are marked with his own individuality: The Fishing Party (c.1730), The Wedding of Stephen Bechingham and Mary Cox (c.1730). In 1729, he married a daughter of William Hogarth painting teacher Sir James Thornhill. The scene from The Beggar’s Opera, the William Hogarth art of an actual stage, brought him great success, and at about about 1730, the painter was commissioned for several versions. The result of this accomplishment was the idea of his own ‘theater’: the creation of ‘pictorial dramas’ and reaching wider public through the means of engraving. The first successful series The Harlot’s Progress, of which only the engravings now exist (the originals were burnt in 1755), was immediately followed by the tremendous verve of The Rake’s Progress; the masterpiece of the story series The Marriage a la Mode followed, after an interval of twelve years. His satires were serious moral and social satires, besides being good William Hogarth paintings. In 1935, the artist opened his own academy in St. Martyn's Lane.

List of Famous William Hogarth Paintings